Tuberculosis Research Community

Why Tuberculosis Is Important

Tuberculosis (TB), the disease caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb), infects approximately two billion people. The World Health Organization estimates that about two million people die each year from TB due to the lack of and inability to afford proper health care. Overcrowding and ill-nourishment of poor people living in large cities leads to ahigh incidence of the disease due to the ease at which the infection can be transferred. This contributes to the accelerated speed at which TB spreads in underdeveloped countries. There is also an alarming increase in cases of TB caused by multidrug-resistant strains of Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb), due in part to inadequate drug therapy as a result of incorrectly selected medications or suboptimal drug dosing. Thus, there is a need for new drugs targeting enzymes essential to mycobacterial survival.

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As a guest on The Synaptic Leap, you can browse and look all you want. You must login and create a user profile for yourself if you want to participate. Once you are logged in you may begin collaborating with other scientists world-wide and become a part of the collective intelligence trying to help improve the drugs available for schisto.

Get Involved with an Open Research Project

See current projects for a list of our active open research projects. You may learn more about these projects and learn how you can participate. Or, you may "add a child page" (see the link at the bottom) to initiate and describe your own open research project for tuberculosis.

If you're still in the brainstorming phase of starting a project, write a blog article to discuss your ideas with other scientists around the world also studying TB. Working together, we can direct the research towards the most promising ideas.

You can also help shape and direct other TB research ideas by reading and commenting on other community posts.

Keep Up To Date with The Latest TB Information

To assist you with your tuberculosis research we have pulled together a research tools page and an RSS news feeds for TB. If you know of a useful tool that we don't have on the list, login and add a comment for others to see. You can also push articles to our RSS news feeds by using the "Tuberculosis" tag on either Connotea or CiteULike.

Comments

Anacardic compounds in cashew pears and raw cashew nuts are very lethal to gram positive bacteria. Therefore it is possible that they would prove useful against tuberculosis since tuberculosis is said to be related to gram positive bacteria. You may see a discussion of their successful use against tooth abscess bacteria in http://charles_w.tripod.com/tooth.html . Perhaps you could use your influence to get what would be an easy, safe experiment performed using cashew nuts, cashew pears, or mango fruit. Anacardic acids could even possibly be used to see if they add to the potency of other medicines. Isonicotinoylhydrazones were synthesized from a natural product anacardic acid, a major constituent of cashew nut shell liquid. The unsaturated side chain in anacardic acid and its 5-nitro derivative were converted into C8′-aldehydes by oxidative cleavage. C8′-aldehydes are then coupled with isoniazid (an anti-TB drug) to obtain N-isonicotinoyl-N′-8-[(2′-carbohydroxy-3′-hydroxy) phenyl] octanal hydrazone (5) and N-isonicotinoyl-N′-8-[(2′-carbohydroxy-3′-hydroxy-6-nitro) phenyl] octanal hydrazone (6). These isonicotinoylhydrazones of anacardic aldehydes showed potent antimycobacterial activity against Mycobacterium smegmatis mc2155. The synergistic studies of 5 and 6 with isoniazid showed more inhibitory activities than isoniazid alone. Compounds 5 and 6 also showed activity against Mycobacterium tuberculosis H37Rv. (abstract from http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0223523406003278 ) Sincerely, Charles Weber